


The Snake in the Grass

by stele3



Series: The Tether Series [9]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Autistic Character, F/F, F/M, Gen, If you're John Silver that is, Jewish John Silver, Judaism, M/M, Marielena is the best, Philosophical Discussions, Polyamory, Slavery, Sometimes lying can be a form of therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22394044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: James flushes appreciably. “You can’t quote erotic Bible verse to win every argument.”“I have thus far.”“Don’t distract me, I have a point to make here.”-o-Many thanks to eufry for the sensitivity read.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw & Madi, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton/John Silver, Madi/John Silver, OFC/OFC
Series: The Tether Series [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/924627
Comments: 18
Kudos: 99





	The Snake in the Grass

Despite the best efforts of James and John, Erik is far too clever and quickly ferrets out their deception regarding the bed. By then, however, it is already ensconced in the sun parlor and every able hand in the house refuses to move it again, and so he must content himself with helping James to build its replacement.

While they toil, the rest of the household spends several days transferring their meager belongings from the bandbox to their new home. At the last possible moment Thomas decides to bring their bed, a purely sentimental choice that causes no shortage of grumbling from James; but he rounds up Hamish and Benjamin, and Rebekah helps ferry it across town and up the stairs of the Avery House—as Thomas has named it in his mind—into the spare bedroom. Hamish, who is strong as an ox and just as dumb, makes several hearty comments about beds and Marielena to James, and it is a testament to Rebekah’s personal growth that she does not gut him on the spot.

The new bed that James builds for them is much more easily transported: he has designed it most ingeniously to be disassembled and carried in pieces, then fit back together. This does require quite a bit more hammering and cursing than Thomas thinks should ever happen in a bedroom—at least with actual hammers—but in the end James very proudly gifts them with an elegant four-poster. John immediately pushes him down onto it.

Other projects prove more fraught. Erik presents them all with a list of necessaries on behalf of his mother’s people, which they divide up amongst themselves and set about procuring. Five white citizens of the ton each purchasing a few unusual items draws far less attention than one mulatto slave boy, and in no time at all James bundles the lot into an armoire. Then he and Erik drive their cart out past the town guards on the pretext of making a delivery to a nearby hamlet.

They are gone overnight. Thomas spends those long hours pacing the downstairs rooms. It is the longest time and furthest distance that he has been separated from James since their reunion at the plantation and he finds himself unable to rest. John stays up with him, his presence a placid balm.

“I suppose this is quite foolish to you,” Thomas comments when it is gone two and he’s given up any hope of sleeping tonight. “You, who have seen James pass through calamities of nature and war. I cannot say that I envy you, for I would never want to see him dance so close to harm…but I envy your perspective in this moment.”

John laughs softly. He’s seated in the dining room near the front window, the better to keep watch. “Don’t. I earned that perspective by being one of those calamities. Come, Mr. Hamilton, it would take far worse than anything lurking in the wilds of the Pennsylvania colony to end Captain Flint. Did I tell you, the first time I laid eyes on him, he’d just beaten a man to death with his bare hands?”

As a distraction, this proves most effective. There is little that fascinates Thomas more than the subject of how James and John came to be what they are to one another. “Truly. And yet you allied yourself with him?”

“Well, not at first. At first I thought him mad, and fled for my life. But it so happened that everyone _else_ on the island was truly mad and I was forced to surrender myself to his clutches, in the hopes that I might prove myself worth the trouble I’d caused him.”

“An isle full of madmen. And _you_ became the most feared among them.”

John sighs and shifts in place. His leg is bothering him; Thomas has learned to recognize the signs. “You can thank Billy Bones for that.”

It takes a moment to place the name. Once he does, Thomas cannot hide his instinctive flinch as he recalls that night in Savannah. His only impression of Billy Bones was that of a shadowed, hulking monster who growled commands and brought James to his knees.

But when he sets aside his own horror—with some effort—he spies the wistfulness in John’s expression. “I told you that Flint and Madi invented John Silver. Well, Billy Bones invented Long John Silver. His parents were agitators against the press gangs, so in retaliation the press gangs snatched young Billy. I take it that some of their acumen with the written word passed on to him. When we allied ourselves with the Maroons and sought to make war against the governor in Nassau, Billy softened our way with tales of a new monster, more fearsome than any that had come before and wholly born of the sea.”

“I see,” Thomas says slowly, feeling his way along a treacherous path. “James was your captain. Ms. Scott was your wife. What was Billy Bones to you?”

For a moment he thinks he’s pressed too far and John will give him a sing-songing lie; but then John sighs and leans back in his chair, rubbing one hand through his hair. It’s grown soft and curly around his ears now. James delights in winding one spiral around and around his fingers.

“Did Flint ever tell you how I came to lose my leg?” he asks.

Thomas shakes his head as he draws up a chair and sits on the other side of the window.

“It was in Charlestown, while he was ashore with the—with Mrs. Barlow.” His eyes flick to Thomas, gauging his reaction to the name; it is, terribly, only a dull ache under his breastbone. It appears he has managed to absorb that blow. Thomas gestures for him to continue. “In his absence the ship was attacked by another pirate, one Charles Vane. Except then Vane elected instead to rescue Flint, in order to prevent Governor Ashe from making an example of him as warning to all other pirates.

“Unfortunately he left his quartermaster in charge of the ship, and that man elected instead to abandon both captains and sail away. Trouble was, he couldn’t do so without the help of ten men from Flint’s crew. Through a series of events, he landed on me as the one who might provide him with the names of those who might be so inclined. The rest, of course, would have their throats cut.”

Here he peters out, staring at the window. Thomas prompts softly: “You didn’t give him the names.”

John sucks in a short breath and then says in a rush, “Ashton, Barton, Dennell, Foss, Gauthier, Konkwo, Paquet, Sanders, Selassie, Thernier. Those were the names I would have given, except when the quartermaster’s men came to fetch me, Billy _fucking_ Bones stood up and tried to stop them. He called me his brother and fought for me, even in chains.”

He will say no more on the subject, which obviously lies so near to his heart that to draw it out would cause a terrible wound.

Erik and James return home just before dawn, weary, a little dirty, and successful. They relate a little of their expedition to John, Thomas, and Rebekah, who wandered downstairs at some point unheard and was lurking behind Thomas’ chair for far longer than he realized. Marielena, thankfully, is still fast asleep; had she learned of the perilous voyage she likely would have given her opinion on the subject at great length.

James had accompanied Erik to within a few leagues before staying behind, out of deference to the encampment’s fear of white men. Erik had driven the cart the last distance and been greeted at first with wariness and then with joy and gratitude. He has returned with an additional list of supplies, which must certainly be procured before the winter months.

That, though, is a task for tomorrow. For now, Erik retires to his sun bed. James is an upstanding citizen of the ton and a business owner, and so he downs several cups of strong black tea—brewed by Marielena, who by now has awakened and is properly furious, but not so angered as to deny a man his breakfast—and goes to work like a man marching to war and expecting to lose.

He certainly looks the part when Thomas returns home. “I am old,” James says by way of greeting.

He is seated on the small bench he built for the hallway by the main door, having clearly removed his boots and then decided that was quite enough and settled in to sleep propped against the wall. Thomas closes the door behind him then leans down. “‘After I am become old,’” he murmurs against James’ lips, “‘shall I have pleasure, my lord being also old?’”

James flushes appreciably. “You can’t quote erotic Bible verse to win every argument.”

“I have thus far.”

“Don’t distract me, I have a point to make here.”

Thomas takes a seat beside him on the bench. “I wait with bated breath and held tongue, my love.”

James regains his previous melancholic air. “Before I made your acquaintance, I never thought much of the future. If I had, I would have pictured something…simple. Uncomplicated. An unwanted wife that I would have honored as best I could, children that I might have learned to love. It is…not a terrible thing to imagine, but I would not have truly _grown old_ in that life, for I would not have grown at all.

“After we lost you, Miranda and I spent ten years together on that bloody island, and yet neither of us truly moved beyond that moment of grief. Miranda tried and there were days when I hated her for the effort. I’m sure she hated me at times, too.”

He pauses a moment as if to weigh those words and find them just. Thomas wishes to God he could deny them, but he does not know how. He was not there with them. Oh, Miranda.

There. There is the ache.

“As it was,” James continues, “neither of us ever planned for the future. If we had, perhaps we might have had children of our own together…but who could raise a child in a mausoleum? We were both living tombs for you. When pressed by others I wove a tale about Odysseus returning home to a peaceful life, but in truth I never imagined an end for myself that was not bloody. Miranda told me that I was fighting for the sake of fighting. As always she knew me best.”

Letting his head fall back against the wall, James looked up at the ceiling, the staircase above them, the doorways into the dining room and front parlor. “Now…this house will need a roof in a few years. The orchard wants for pruning and the floor above the cellar is caving in a bit. I find myself planning how best to resolve such things that will last longer than my own life, other than the story of Captain Flint. I can feel myself growing old in this place and I find that I do not want to resist.”

Thomas takes his hand. “Do not. I would hate to leave you behind again, my love, and I am grown old, myself.”

He takes James upstairs, where he falls asleep like a stone dropping into a pool. Thomas actually has to undress him piece by piece, and he gives up at the shirt and trousers when James grumbles at him sleepily and grabs Thomas about the waist, pulling him down and planting himself on Thomas’ chest as the foundations of a fortress.

John finds them as thus when he returns home. He stands in the doorway, eyeing the back of James—snoring—and Thomas—pinned, helpless—with some amusement. The lines about his eyes crinkle deep; he looks older than he should, Thomas knows, and feels a different kind of ache at the knowledge.

-o-

Summer begins to bleed into autumn properly, and they have their first freeze. To the surprise of everyone—herself perhaps most of all—Rebekah finds gainful employment with the apple harvest. It’s hard labor but requires minimal contact with other people; she comes home with a sore neck, tired hands, and a smile. When Thomas points out that they’ve enough coin to last them several years at least, she merely shrugs and says, “I like the trees.”

After that Thomas leaves well enough alone. The physical labor seems to do her good, and a bit more coin never hurts.

He does find himself wishing they’d come into possession of the house a little earlier in the year. Once James has procured a scythe and cleared the brush from the orchard like a ginger Death, Rebekah plucks the trees bare of most the fruit. With the boughs unburdened and the ground cleared, their orchard is a veritable Garden of Eden, though the ground stays damp on all but the warmest days.

On those precious few days, someone invariably drags their more worn blankets outside to lie in the grass. Usually that someone is John, who spends his Sundays flat on his back in the sun, his eyes closed and his curly black hair spread around his head on the blanket.

And, well, who could resist such an enticing tableau? He is the snake in the Garden, and neither James nor Thomas feel at all inclined to resist temptation.

Fortunately, Rebekah has taken to walking Marielena to church and sitting outside—it being a much further journey than from their small bandbox—and Erik passes his Sundays in the back room of James’ shop, toiling over items intended for his mother’s people in secret. Thomas suspects that James would be there as well if he had his druthers, but self-sufficiency is the first step to true freedom. Erik has learned much at James’ side; it is time he applied those lessons towards his own endeavors.

So it happens that the three of them are alone in the house, on a Sunday. It is warm enough outside to venture forth, likely one of the last warm days they will have before the chill of autumn truly sets in, and Thomas looks up from his morning scones to discover that his lovers have abandoned him to chase the sun.

When Thomas follows after, he finds John and James in nothing but their breeches already, lounging on a blanket in the orchard and feeding each other cheese or bread. Or, well, John is feeding James while James reads and absentmindedly opens his mouth whenever John proffers a bite, all without looking away from his book.

“I could be feeding him grass,” John comments as Thomas settles onto the blanket beside them, divesting himself of his nightshirt as he does so.

“Hmm?” James says, neatly proving John’s point.

“James. James. James, my love, a moment of your time?”

“Hmm. Two more pages.”

Dropping onto his hands and knees, Thomas crawls up the length of James’ body. The top of his head encounters the book and pushes it upward as he goes, which James allows with a huff, though he closes the book around his finger to mark his place.

“My god,” John exclaims. “Does that _work_?”

“Sometimes,” Thomas says, still grinning down at James, who is attempting—and failing—to appear displeased at the intrusion. “As most things, it works best if you are fully nude.”

“Well, by all means,” John says, and reaches out to curl his fingers over the waist of Thomas’ breeches.

They make love in the cold air of morning, their fingers chasing goosebumps across each other’s skin and trying at all times to keep the blankets from slipping too far from their shoulders. Nipples pebble and grow tender to the touch until soothed by a warm mouth. During a lull, as James rests his head on Thomas’ chest, John barks a laugh and points to where a little steam is actually rising from the blanket covering James’ back. James responds by pulling his cold feet into the cocoon and shoving them into John’s groin.

This leads to quite a bit more wrestling than Thomas thinks should happen while all parties are nude, but it does work up quite a bit more warmth, enough that John flings the top blanket back and spreads his three limbs outwards in a stretch. He’s put on some weight and muscle but still looks quite lean from his illness.

Propping himself up on one elbow, Thomas drifts a hand down over John’s collarbones to the flat, delicate valley of his sternum. “‘I sent a sigh unto my blest one’s ear, which lost its way and never did come there; I hastened after, lest some other fair should mildly entertain this traveling air.’”

John casts him a dubious look. “A curious choice of recitation for a man who’s been fucked by two lovers in the past hour.”

Thomas smiles as his fingers traverse John’s ribs. The flesh under his tightens imperceptibly, belying a ticklish response that John cannot fully suppress. “‘Each flowr’y garden did I search, for fear it might mistake a lily for her ear; and having there took lodging, might still dwell, housed in the concave of a crystal bell.’”

With a sigh, John rolls onto his side to face Thomas but offers no further commentary, seemingly resigned to his fate. James settles behind him with a smile and a kiss to John’s shoulder. Observing them, Thomas interrupts himself in order to sigh. “I do wish I had any skill as a painter, for I would love to draw your forms. No, don’t look at me like that, you mistake me. Look.” He trails a finger down John’s side; this time he does squirm and swats at Thomas. “You, my love, are all squares. A solid line from shoulders to hips, as befit the weary Hercules.”

“An apt descriptor,” John agrees.

“Weary?” James inquires slyly. “Or Hercules?”

“Yes.”

“But you.” Thomas slips his hand past John to rub his palm over the dip of James’ waist and the curve of his hip. “Possess the lankiness of Michelangelo’s David.”

“I’m fairly certain this isn’t how the poem goes,” James admonishes with a smile.

John cranes his head back to glare up at James. “Captain, have you no heart? Canst you not hear the sigh of a lovelorn lord—”

He barely gets the last bit out past his own laughter, which turns into shouts of dismay as Thomas descends on him, his fingers digging into those ticklish places over which they glanced earlier. “No, no, ack, mercy! Captain, save me!”

He tucks back against James’ broader chest and Thomas relents in favor of pressing closer on the other side, caging John between their bodies. Once, that would have driven him into a very quiet panic so contained as to warrant its own internal treasure chest; but now he lets Thomas loop an arm over his waist and eagerly arches as James slides his hand lower, lower.

A moan reverberates into Thomas’ mouth as James finds his mark. John pulls away to pant and Thomas draws him close, pressing kisses to his jaw and neck as James shifts, rising up onto one knee and guiding their bodies together into union. They are so deliciously beautiful, their bellies flexing as they both move. Thomas cradles John’s head in one arm and pets the other hand over their archways of bone and warm, wet peaks.

John grabs at him. “Please.”

“Please what, my dear?”

John can’t quite say it—requests made in the marriage bed still elude him—and so he merely takes Thomas by the hand to guide him down, too. James stretches out along his back, reaching to turn John’s face to him; they kiss with abandon, half-missing each other’s mouths, and John seems to lose all focus on that task when Thomas sets to fulfilling his request, taking John in hand.

They’ve lost the blankets again. James in particular is exposed to the air and likes it the least: his shoulder bothers him sometimes on the coldest nights, old scars and damaged muscles drawing tight. That isn’t the arm he has propped under him right now, but he still winces, his rhythm stuttering. John whines.

“On your back, my dear,” Thomas suggests, letting go of John—who whines louder and curses them both—in favor of gathering the blankets as James takes hold of John and rolls.

Somehow, he manages not to pull free of John’s body, and puts his heels down in order to resume thrusting up into John, who whimpers and reaches behind him to grab James by the hair. James snarls in protest, gone animalistic in his fervor, and Thomas moves quickly to untangle John’s fingers, soothing him with kisses and a hand on his cock. John’s face has gone slack with pleasure; he is close, leaking into Thomas’ palm. He throws his head back and moans into Thomas’ mouth.

“Mind you,” James grunts, twisting his face to one side in order to avoid taking John’s skull to his nose. Then he goes still. “Jesus fucking, _Madi?_ ”

Detaching his mouth from John’s, Thomas lifts his head. Standing two dozen feet away among the apple trees is an African woman in a threadbare dress holding a knife. She stares at the three of them with one hand pressed to her mouth—

\--a hand that is missing her pinkie and ring fingers.

“Oh fuck,” Thomas blurts.

“M—wh—?” John doesn’t seem capable of forming complete words. Which is somewhat understandable considering that he was just getting fucked within an inch of his life.

“I’m sorry,” the woman— _Madi_ —says. “I heard Silver and I thought—”

Without finishing the sentence, she turns away. John’s body strains heedlessly after her, hands flailing as he nearly rolls off of James, who has to grip him about the waist so as to prevent John from pulling free too fast and causing both of them harm.

“Thomas,” James grits out.

Thomas is already scrambling up, securing his trousers one-handed and clumsily putting something which turns out to be James’ waistcoat around his shoulders. Leaving all else behind, he races after Madi bare-footed.

He needn’t have bothered to rush: the garden wall at this point in the orchard stands a good seven feet, well over her head. When she hears him approach she turns sharply and Thomas quickly raises his hands, slowing to a stop.

“Good—afternoon,” he fumbles out. “I…believe you are the lady Scott?”

“Where is the gate?” she demands. She turns from side to side like an animal seeking to escape a predator. “I should not have come here. How do I get back out?”

“The gate is near the house. I can lead you there. My name is Thomas, Thomas Hamilton.”

Her wide gaze flies to him. “You are Flint’s Thomas?”

“As much as I am anyone’s Thomas.” Now that he knows she isn’t going to disappear as suddenly as she arrived, he takes in more details: her fine cheekbones, the expert way she holds the knife in her hand, the way her dress—clearly an item she has long owned—hangs too loose around her waist and arms. Like Thomas, someone has taught her to walk as though she were capable of bearing the world on her shoulders.

Though Thomas suspects that in her case, that teacher meant the lesson in earnest.

She appears to be taking his measure as well, and Thomas desperately wishes that he were not half-dressed and covered with sweat and grass-stains, not to mention blots of a different source.

Abandoning any attempt at disassembling, he gives her a quick, wry smile. “This is awkward, but may I accompany you to the gate? You can decide what to do from there, but if you’re amenable I would like very much to share a cup of tea, as I have heard a great deal about you and confess to no small amount of curiosity.” When she makes no reply, he gestures. “Shall we?”

They walk along the inside of the wall. From somewhere distantly to their left, Thomas hears John’s voice rise in a betrayed shout: “ _You wrote her a fucking_ letter?” Followed by the slam of their back door.

Thomas darts his eyes to the side, but Miss Scott shows nothing with her expression, merely walks with her own gaze forward. And, well, Thomas cannot help but feel a little betrayed, too, for _he_ certainly hadn’t known about any missive, either. Why on Earth would James have written to her, when he knew doing so would upset John and potentially draw other former associates from their dangerous past to them? What possible justification could he have for—

Ah. Of course. Erik.

They reach the gate and Thomas opens it, stepping to the side so as to be hidden by the stone wall. Through the narrow opening he can see out into the street; two narrow packs lie discarded on the cobblestones, as if Miss Scott had cast them down in her haste to, apparently, climb the bloody _wall_.

She moves to exit the gate and Thomas speaks up: “I do hope that you will do me the honor of receiving you in the front room for tea, Miss Scott. I imagine that James has requested your counsel on a particular matter of interest to myself as well, and if you will but grant me a measure of five minutes, I promise to appear in far less scandalous attire and give you a proper welcome to our home.”

It is as warm and solicitous an invitation as he can manage at the moment.

She laughs at it.

Well, not outright. For the first time—second, if he recalls her initial shock at discovering them _en flagrante_ —her queenly mask breaks and she chokes out what he might dare to call a giggle.

Pressing her lips together, she looks out into the street then casts him a wry glance. “Why, Lord Hamilton, you are far too kind. I would be delighted.”

Then she curtsies.

And _oh_. He was intrigued before but now he is also delighted. Both of his men have spoken about this woman at length: they described her strength, her beauty, her resilience and courage, and the soaring breadth of her intellect.

Neither of them had mentioned that she had a sense of _humor_.

With that parting shot she steps out of the gate, and Thomas hobbles back through the orchard towards the house, passing through their decamped picnic and cursing his old limbs the whole way. He does manage to scoop up a shirt as he goes, which he hopes belongs to James. The idea of appearing to Miss Scott in her husband’s too-small shirt is nearly as humiliating as what has already transpired. 

There’s no sign of John or James in the house save for a riot of thumps from upstairs. Thomas sends up a prayer that they, too, are composing themselves with the intention of reemerging—rather than hiding in a closet somewhere—before he sets about stirring up the fire. With a kettle of water on to heat, he gives himself a quick bath with some of Marielena’s kitchen rags before straightening his clothes to something halfway presentable.

He’s just setting the tea to steep when the front hallway resounds with a knock.

The thumps upstairs halt momentarily, but no one descends the stairs. Thus abandoned to his own devices, Thomas moves to open the front door. It appears Miss Scott has used the five minutes since their last parting in a similar manner: her dress has been straightened and her long black braids have been piled on her head in a circular fashion not unlike a crown.

“Miss Scott, please do come in. May I ask how you take your tea? Cream?”

“Just sugar, please,” she replies as he leads her to the dining table in the front parlor. Thankfully they’d cleaned up their morning dishes, but Thomas despairs at the light patina of crumbs as he takes a seat and pours them both a cup.

“Ah, I imagine everyone in the West Indes took sugar with their tea, surely? Being that the crop was so plentiful there.”

“I do not know how the English and Spanish made their tea, but among the Maroons, we brewed tea from the bark of trees. It was quite bitter and wanted for sweetness to temper the flavor.”

From overhead there’s a crash of broken pottery, followed quickly by John’s voice. “ _How the_ fuck _am I supposed to talk to her with your come still leaking out of me?_ ”

Whatever James says in reply is inaudible. Thomas’ eyes meet those of Miss Scott’s. He summons every delicate courtly courtesy he has ever possessed, even dressed in stained trousers. “I trust your journey here was a pleasant one?”

“Yes,” she says, then, “No. I was twice mistaken for a prisoner escaping my bond. If I had not taken the precaution of securing a letter from the governor of Nassau, I might have been forced into chains.”

Frowning, Thomas sits forward. “Upon which ship did you arrive in the port?”

“The _Dulcimer_.”

“Was the captain involved? I have for some time been writing editorials in the _Mercury_ regarding the kidnapping of freemen aboard merchant vessels. The practice is less prevalent in the Philadelphia port, but—”

Upstairs, James shouts, “ _How tall is the orchard wall?_ ” Then, “ _Because she fucking scaled it, in a skirt, armed with only a knife, after she heard_ you _crying out. So get my come_ and _your head out your arse!_ ”

Miss Scott’s eyes are trained on the contents of her teacup. Thomas wants to bash his skull against a wall, or perhaps James and John’s skulls together. He takes a deep breath and continues. “Should you desire accompaniment as you move about the city, you have but to ask. I would be delighted to serve as both guide and…well, I was going to say bodyguard, but I expect that you’d prefer James to fulfill that role.” Or John, but he politely leaves that unsaid.

“Thank you for the offer Mr. Hamilton, but I assure you that I require no bodyguards.”

Recalling her grip on the knife, Thomas does not doubt this to be true.

Footsteps tread heavily down the stairs and James enters the dining room with a stormy expression that quails as he visibly realizes they have heard every shout from upstairs. Thomas lifts his eyebrows pointedly and sips his tea as James flushes to his receding hairline.

He does gather himself quickly and addresses their guest. “Miss Scott. I’m very pleased to see you—I was not sure you would receive my letter.”

She rises and surprises them both by crossing to take James by the hand in greeting. “Thank you, Captain. I am very pleased to see you, as well. After all that transpired when last we met, I sent two men to the plantation in Georgia. But being Maroons they could not enter nor find the answers that I needed from the overseers. I never knew whether John’s account of your internment there was a fiction designed to placate me until the very moment I opened your letter. I…apologize for coming here unannounced, but I was even less sure that any return letter I sent would actually reach you.”

“No apology is necessary,” James assures her, and leads her back to the table, where he takes the chair to Thomas’ right. The fourth chair closest to the doorway he leaves conspicuously empty.

James continues, “How are your people?”

“My mother died last year. Julius now leads the island settlement.”

“My condolences.” It’s not clear which of those conditions he means to express sympathy for; perhaps both. “I was given to understand that you had found your way to Jamaica and were fighting with the Maroon encampments, there.”

“Some of them, yes. The Leeward Maroons are led by an Ashanti man named Cudjoe; he does not trust outsiders to his tribe easily, and neither do his people. They revere him. It is useful, as he has kept them organized, but it is dangerous to rest so much on the power of one man to lead. If he were killed, I fear their community would unravel. If the British come, they will know where to strike, but his people might yet hold them back. They have taken guns from two ships wrecked in their harbor, and I have heard they mean to build a fort.

“The Windward Maroons to the interior are less organized but more willing to strike at settlements to free those still held in chains. There is a woman who leads them—they call her Queen Nanny. I do not know what tribe she comes from, nor does she seem to care. She welcomed me and my people, and it is to her that we send any new freedmen. She is cunning and hides her people well from the British.”

James listens intently to her report, stroking his goatee as he does so. A candle of fear lights in Thomas’ belly: he knows that James feels the weight of his own past, but are they not due a little peace?

Perhaps he understands John Silver’s past actions better than he thinks.

As if summoned by Thomas’ thoughts, there comes from above a decisive series of thuds that travel from a bedroom to the hallway. Conversation fades as the stairs begin to creak and they all turn as one to the doorway. The creaks descend like the footsteps of an approaching ghost and John appears, brimming over with the wrath of one.

The first thing he says is, “Where the fuck is your bodyguard?”

“I came without one,” she answers. Her knuckles have gone pale around the handle of her teacup.

John appears to have several strong opinions on that subject which he wrestles with silently. Instead he blurts in a low, gruff voice, “Are you well? You look thin.”

“So do you.”

“ _I’ve_ had fucking smallpox. Are you sick?”

“I am not sick.”

“You know,” John says, and Thomas wants to groan in despair at the very timbre of his voice, “you could have just shot me. That would have been far kinder than leaving me on the side of the road to Southampton with no crutch and not a farthing to my possession. I imagine it was quite a shock to hear from Julius that I was still alive—or perhaps disappointment is closer to the mark? Perhaps he came here on your order, to finish the job.”

“For fuck’s sake, Silver,” James murmurs, looking about as disgusted as Thomas feels.

Madi, however, merely lowers her teacup to her lap. “It is useful, is it not, to feel angry? It blots out everything that one would prefer not to feel. I know the desire well—it was that emotion which rose to my need on the road to Southampton, when grief and fear would have consumed me. But rage only lasts for so long, and then all that is buried rises to the surface again, when it is too late to undo the damage that anger has wrought. There is not a day that passes in which I do not feel ashamed of my actions, not a day when I thought you dead that I did not feel guilt for leaving you there, but it has changed nothing. The damage was done.

“As for your other accusation, no, I did not know that Julius had come here to do you harm. If I had, I would have stopped him. If he had succeeded, I believe I would have been so moved by rage as to kill him with my bare hands.”

That quite effectively takes the wind out of John’s sails; he lowers his gaze to the floor and shifts on his crutch as if trying to regain his footing. Thomas gazes at her nonplussed, while James sips tea.

Finally John visibly gives up on attempting a rejoinder and crosses to the fourth chair, into which he flings himself. Thomas silently pours him a cup of tea but John does not touch it; nor does he speak. In this wholly uncharacteristic silence, his hands find the edge of the tablecloth and fret at its filigree. It’s quite a fine cloth, probably one of the more expensive things in their possession. Thomas imagines that if Marielena were home she would strike his knuckles.

After an uncomfortably pause that John fails to fill, Miss Scott resumes her conversation with James. “What do you know of the encampment here, beyond that which you have already told me in your letter?”

“A hundred strong at last count, but many are children too young to defend themselves. Most fled Boston last year during the pox, when their owners fell ill. This was not an uprising, merely a departure of enslaved peoples from those who were too unwell to hold them by force; as of yet they have no leaders or unity, and they rely heavily on the kindness of the native Delaware tribe.” Observing the grave expression on Miss Scott’s face, James spreads his hands. “You see my concern.”

“I do.”

“Fucking hell,” John interjects, strangled. “Not this again. Don’t look at me like that, next the two of you will be drawing up plans to march on Dummer’s forces.”

Real anguish thrums under his voice, and Thomas cannot help but reach out to touch one of his twisting hands. John grabs at his fingers reflexively, though his grip convulses when Miss Scott’s gaze touch on them.

She does not comment on it, though, just says, “Action does not require violence to be effective, but too often, inaction _is_ violence.”

“And action frequently _begets_ violence, if the wrong sort of people find out!”

“And yet you have exposed yourself in order to come to the aid of those in chains,” Miss Scott counters. “Why would you expect me to do any differently?”

John frowns. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“Five months ago, I had strange news from Nassau. Eme remains in the employment of the innkeeper there.” John casts her a quick, sharp glance but says nothing; Miss Scott must understand his silent question, because she nods. “The same. I believe she suffered terribly the loss of Captain Rackham and his companions.”

Something else quick and complicated passes over John’s face. James puts his teacup down with a clink. “What the fuck did you do.”

John attempts to dissemble but his own self-satisfaction betrays him. “One good turn deserves another. Max allowed me to smuggle you to the plantation when the powers that be demanded your death; shortly after Jack Rackham hanged in Port Royale, I smuggled Anne Bonny out of a jail cell in Kingston.”

Miss Scott raises an eyebrow. “So the innkeeper did not suffer so terribly as I thought.”

John shrugs, his eyes on his untouched teacup. “She might have. There wasn’t much left of Bonny, without Rackham. What strange news did you have from the innkeeper?”

“The arrival of four escaped slaves from Philadelphia, each carrying Spanish pieces of eight and the tale of a one-legged man who spoke their tongue with ease.”

James huffs an incredulous noise. “By God. They made it.”

“They did not speak of a second man who came to their rescue but I should not be surprised to find you were involved.”

“What became of them?”

“Julius could not accept them without risking the treaty. One was captured by the British and hanged; one disappeared, and Eme managed to smuggle the other two to me in Jamaica.”

“Two.” John hasn’t looked up from the teacup. “There were nine we freed. Two made it to you. And what became of them afterwards?”

“One died fighting the British. The other was still alive when I departed the island. Her name is Bayo.”

One, out of nine. Thomas remembers the stocks and the auction house, and tries not to wonder what became of those who simply disappeared.

Those thoughts get dashed aside when Miss Scott reaches out and—with the slightest hesitation—sets her hand on John’s. John goes still, the kind of stillness that denies breath, and darts his eyes over to her. Thomas wonders if he should let go of John’s other hand but decides against it, in case John needs a tether to pull him out of deep waters. Across the table James is silent.

“I know that you have found some peace, here,” Miss Scott says. “I am glad for that, truly. And I understand why you might fear its dissolution. I promise you, now, that I have not come to destroy that peace.”

The combination of her words and touch appear to have rendered John unto stone, so after a moment she withdraws her hand and turns back to James. “I would very much like to meet Erik, and grant to him what advice I can. Once I have found a boarding room in the town, I will send you a message.”

She rises and they stand with her, John using the table as leverage as he gropes for his crutch. Thomas is just opening his mouth to find some way of delaying her departure further when her breath catches and her poise suddenly crumbles.

“Madi?” James says.

John, who knows her better, has already shoved his crutch aside and is diving, heedless to the crack of his own knee against the thin carpet as she swoons sideways. Her grasping hand knocks the teacup off the table. It shatters on the floor but Miss Scott lands safely in John’s arms and he twists her away from its shards.

“Madi,” John says frantically. James moves quickly around the table to kneel beside them; Thomas stands but comes no closer, not wishing to crowd the air. “Madi!”

“I’m all right,” she mumbles. Her hands curls around John’s elbow, holding tight.

“Thomas, some water,” James instructs, which Thomas hastens to fetch, along with a dampened kerchief. By the time he returns, Miss Scott is sitting up with her back to John’s chest while James loosens her sleeves and the stays around the neck of her dress.

“I am not ill, only tired,” she is saying, already lucid. She accepts the water from Thomas and allows John to drape the kerchief over the back of her neck. They must be quite a sight, three men fussing over a woman who appears quite a bit calmer than anyone else in the room. “I did not sleep well on the voyage.”

“Then you will rest here,” James says in a voice that brokers no argument. “We’ve a spare room upstairs.”

The offer is met with weak protests that quickly fade. Once she has recovered enough to stand, James helps her to her feet. John is a silent, anxious presence at her shoulder as they move to the stairs; but he does not follow them up, though his gaze does. Gingerly, Thomas drifts to his side, but this time John is the one to reach out first, taking his hand.

John latches onto him with a grip that does not quite hurt. But his eyes stay fixed on some point unseeable to Thomas. “What is she doing here?” he whispers, as if they hadn’t all just spoken on the subject.

“I gather that she missed you.” What other reasons Miss Scott had for coming here, that seems very clear.

“No,” John says. He tugs his hand out of Thomas’ and turns away from the stairs, thumping back into the parlor. Thomas trails after him uncertainly and stands watching as John stares for a long moment at the shards of Miss Scott’s teacup before descending the length of his crutch onto one knee in order to gather up the delicate porcelain pieces.

Watching him, Thomas cannot help but feel uneasy. He has seen the effect that James has on John; he has witnessed the impact of his own presence, as well. But this, the quiet, careful way that John is gathering the shattered teacup…this, he does not know.

Quietly he asks, “Do you wish her gone?”

“No,” John replies, shaking his head. His curls fall into his face and he does not look at Thomas, merely climbs back up the length of his crutch and carries the shards into the kitchen.

It is concerning behavior that Thomas raises with James later. They are taking a turn down Second Street, which is the furthest they can go without being run down by any carts driven by wild-eyed farmers rushing their goods to the market. It will freeze soon and everyone is putting away their winter stores; Thomas gathers that several settlements failed to do so last year and things became quite dire indeed. It is strange to remember the many ways in which this bustling city is still an outpost of civilization, clinging to the edge of a vast, uncharted continent.

They’d left John in the library, curled up in the window seat with a book and studiously ignoring their invitation to walk with them. He is quiet, still, and grows every more worrisome.

When Thomas inquires after the state of John’s marriage to Miss Scott, James grows very pensive. “I don’t know. He hid a great deal of it from me—from everyone. Even among the pirates, a white man wed to a Maroon woman would have drawn comment. There came a moment, though, when we thought we had lost him, and Madi spoke frankly to me. She said they’d married in the custom of her people, though she hid this fact from her own tribe, as well.”

Thomas contemplates this. “How difficult that must have been for them. Has John ever spoken of their life after you parted ways with him?”

James looks a little put out to have it described in such terms, but it’s not as though Thomas can talk of chains and betrayal on a busy street corner. “He said that I was right—that she never trusted him again.”

“And yet she went with him to Bristol, and they lived together running an inn.” The form of it is taking shape in Thomas’ head: a cold existence, each retiring to their own bed—or worse, lying together with a vast emotional ocean still between them. Thomas knew all too well the ways in which a body’s needs can torture the heart: when he’d first married Miranda, he had thought that perhaps, perhaps this brilliant, wonderful creature would finally make him the person that his father could love.

In that state he had tried rather desperately to be a proper husband to her and made them both miserable with the attempts. Only after he cast off the shackles of his father’s lies had they come to a better understanding, and a better love.

He shares these thoughts with James, who frowns and says, “If ever Silver fully abandoned his own lies, I doubt there would be anything left of him.”

“Well that is a terrible thing to say.”

“It’s the truth.” James puts his hands together behind his back as he walks. “He’s a man constructed entirely of artifice. By the end I had come to see that, and yet that did not change my sentiments towards him, as I myself was wearing my own mask at the time. I expect that Madi’s affections were more damaged than my own. She has never been anything but herself in whole.”

“She does strike me that way.”

They have reached the waterfront and stand for a time watching the sailboats move in and out of the harbor. James squints against the sun; he is looking intently out across the water to where the pirate encampment stands. Thomas wonders if someone over there would recognize James. He doubts it. He hopes not.

He says, “I cannot imagine that either of them found any joy in that life.”

“Nor I.”

“I would not see that unhappiness take root, here.”

“Nor I.”

“Would you…do you desire for Miss Scott to find happiness here, as well?”

Underneath his words is another question: _do you desire Miss Scott?_

Once upon a time, Miranda had found a young lieutenant most agreeable, and her feelings had been reciprocated. Thomas would never, ever want James to torture his heart with the desires of his body.

James hears the unspoken question and ducks his head, a little pink. After a moment he says with some difficulty, “I had not much time to simply sit and speak with her. Everything happened so quickly; I would have liked to discuss a great many matters of the mind. I’m given to understand that she is quite a prodigious reader.”

“Oh, well. Then it’s decided: she must be encouraged to stay.”

Thus resolved, they turn their feet towards home again. Home—what an extraordinary thing to have rediscovered. Certainly they’d spent enough time in the wretched bandbox as to count for something, but this place, this house with its orchard and cellar and library, is _home_ in a much more profound sense, though they have spent little time there yet by comparison. It has drawn in all of their eccentric assortment and served all their needs, and for what other purpose should a house become a home?

He can only hope that Miss Scott can be persuaded to agree with him, and John…well, he’s not sure yet what John needs.

-o-

Rebekah and Marielena return home shortly thereafter; in fact, James and Thomas meet them at the front step and appraise them as to the day’s events (with some editing to preserve the dignity of all those involved). Marielena appears cautious and even alarmed, no doubt recalling the last figures from John’s past who caused them such trouble, but Rebekah shows great interest in their houseguest, and asks many questions. She hunts John down in the study and asks some of him, too. Thomas has to stop her from marching upstairs to wake Miss Scott and demand an introduction at once. He isn’t quite sure what to make of her curiosity but leaves it be for now.

When James suggests a proper dinner to welcome Miss Scott, Marielena forgets her hesitations at once and launches herself into the kitchen, bullying John to join her. He obeys, obviously relieved to have a task with which to preoccupy himself.

“That was deftly done,” Thomas comments to James, who looks rather pleased with himself.

When Erik returns from the shop they attempt no such maneuvers, but sit him down in the dining room to tell him frankly what has transpired, as it ostensibly is in his interests that Miss Scott has made her journey north. He appears somewhat confused. “I had asked Mr. Silver about his wife, sir,” he says in a low voice after glancing towards the kitchen, “but he said she would be unlikely to help. He said she sent men here to kill him.”

Thomas groans, inclined anew to strike John about his head and shoulders soundly with a newspaper; James, however, seems thoughtful. “I expect he truly believed that—he would not have denied you aid for the whim of a story. In any case, he was mistaken—she did not order his death, nor has she come to finish the job herself. I sent her a missive soliciting her help in your endeavor and she has come to provide that help.”

“I see. If you’ll pardon, sir—what is she like? Mr. Silver called her a princess. When I meet her, should I bow?”

“I don’t think that necessary,” Thomas assures him, though suddenly he isn’t quite sure, himself. Certainly, if he had met Miss Scott as a visiting royal in Whitehall or his father’s house, he would have genuflected appropriately; but considering the exact nature of their introduction, Thomas will be lucky if she hasn’t already caught sight of his cock.

Thomas refrains from mentioning that story to Erik. Instead he turns to James. “What do you think? Shall he bow? And if so, how deeply?”

James lifts his eyebrows on a swell of obvious amusement, but before he can make a reply, his gaze slides past them and his smile fades as he rises to his feet. The entire room draws to a halt as they each discover Miss Scott standing in the doorway; it’s like John’s arrival earlier, but far more reversed. James rests a hand on Erik’s shoulder to guide him forward and make the proper introductions; poor Erik seems absolutely tongue-tied, his normal glib charm failing him. He does sketch a slight bow. Miss Scott shakes his hand and the three of them step into the front parlor to speak. In the kitchen, John chops vegetables.

Rebekah joins Thomas at the side chairs along the table and hands him an apple. She’s taken to wearing men’s trousers: when Thomas walks his two fingers across a page of his book, she mimes climbing a tree or ladder then flips her hand upward. _All the women in the fields wear them,_ she tells him.

_Thank you for the fruit. They treat you well?_

_Yes. Too few—_ here she pauses for a moment, clearly searching. Their secret language was born in a sanitorium on the far side of the ocean; occasionally they must invent words for this new world. Eventually she settles on a combination of _work_ and _take_. Pick, that must be her meaning. _Too few people that pick. They must treat me well_.

That will change, of course, as more people travel to the colonies, and Thomas can already foresee the moral outrage that will conveniently coincide with the arrival of more able-bodied men—the fairer sex at work in the fields when they should be tending the home, the impropriety of contact between male and female laborers, all a smokescreen to force women out of the fields where they might pursue some kind of physical and even financial independence.

But that moral outrage has not descended upon them yet, and Thomas is not about to take something from Rebekah that so clearly brings her satisfaction.

Rebekah turns one palm towards the front room. _Wife maybe trusted?_

Thomas pauses. Rebekah and James are of a like mind, perhaps too much so; but she trusts his judgment. If he is in the front room seated with Miss Scott and Erik, discussing matters of a most sensitive nature that could easily bring calamity to their house, then her inquiry does not relate to the free camp, or Erik. What, then, would cause Rebekah hesitation?

Rebekah turns her palm towards the kitchen.

Ah.

 _I do not know_.

_Injury in past._

_Yes. She regretted it._

Rebekah considers that. Reverses her hands. _Injury in past_.

Yes. So many wounds between the three of them. They all carry their hidden scars, but John laid deep ones on both James and Miss Scott with his betrayal, and Thomas has a feeling that no sufficient apology has been made to Miss Scott; or if one has been offered, it was not in earnest, and she does not strike Thomas as being the sort of woman to either mistake or overlook insincerity.

Come to think of it, John’s never offered an apology to James, either. Thomas wouldn’t hold his breath on one.

“The world is vast,” he says to Rebekah, “and life is long.” Meaning, _The present is not the past._

Rebekah considers that, then takes the apple back from Thomas, grips it in her hands, and breaks it cleanly in half.

Eventually James decamps from the parlor, looking thoughtful but pleased. Thomas offers him the bit of his apple that is left. “How goes it?”

“Well enough,” James replies as he takes a seat. Oh, how illuminating; but Thomas can understand the nature of his reticence on the matter. Erik loves and reveres James, but he has not led him to the camp nor shared its exact position, and he almost certainly would never divulge that information to Thomas or anyone else. Thomas cannot for one moment bring himself to feel insulted and he respects James’ instinct to follow Erik’s precedent in this regard.

Instead Thomas asks after the winter stores and the shop. It appears that for once the colonial government has proven themselves somewhat competent: a good deal of the harvest has been set aside rather than sent back to England or elsewhere in the New World for coin. It will lower the colony’s profitability with its various creditors—not to mention England—but should the Delaware freeze as it apparently has done in the past, the residents will require food more than coin. No doubt the warnings about the river came from those of the colony’s advisors who have courted native allies and sought their advice.

Marielena ferries various dishes to the table, refusing help from anyone but John, who she harries with instructions. It is an impressive meal indeed, especially constructed on short notice, and Thomas is moved by the occasion to fetch wine from the cellar. It is by now quite dark outside and Thomas’ eyesight has grown abominable in dim spaces, so James makes a clumsy pretense to follow him with candle in hand. Thomas does not tell him—James has enough on his mind already—but he is quite grateful for the company in other ways: his fear of the dark has seeped back in these past few weeks, and Thomas cannot even say why.

At least he is not lacking for company at night these days.

The close stillness of the cellar is especially harrowing, and Thomas is quick to choose a pair of bottles for their table. As he turns back to the cellar stairs, however, James catches his elbow with a gentle hand.

“What?” Thomas asks, rattled. The door out of the cellar is right there.

James makes no reply. They stand but a few inches apart; his face in the candlelight is soft and solemn. Lifting his hand, he lets his knuckles brush across Thomas’ cheek.

Well. Apparently Thomas has not be as successful as he thought in hiding the renewal of his bothersome anxieties. He stands in the dim, close air of the cellar, so much like a cell, and closes his eyes. Lets James caress his cheek and run fingers through his hair. (It has begun to thin on top. They do not speak of that, either.)

When at last they reemerge, Marielena has outdone herself. A veritable feast has been laid on the table, including a rump roast that has somehow been hidden from them. Thomas is simultaneously ravenous and revulsed; even now, years later, he remembers the forced purges he endured at Bedlam.

Rebekah taps the nail of her pinkie finger on the table three times then points that finger at the two bowls of thin, watery soup that also rest on the tabletop. Thomas sighs internally but cannot help feeling relieved. She’s right, of course. With his mind so tangled at the present moment, attempting the rump roast might be out of the question.

For once they use the whole length of the table for their meal: so rarely do all six of them eat together at once that usually, only the end closest to the kitchen hosts them in groups of twos and threes. Now, Marielena positions herself closest to that end of the room, with John sinking into the chair at her left, their tasks evidently not yet complete. James and Thomas both move to occupy the far head of the table then each spend a few moments awkwardly gesturing for the other to take that seat. John snorts at them both loudly.

Eventually James takes the head of the table, smoothing down his waistcoat as he does so. Thomas catches Miss Scott studying him with curiosity; he looks forward to eliciting her impressions of Captain Flint, and the man that James has become afterwards.

He wonders what Miss Scott will become.

They eat. James describes the process by which they came to acquire the house, including their visitation by the man called Julius. Miss Scott interjects, “After he returned to the West Indes, Julius sent me a letter revealing his version of these events, including your location and the presence of Captain Flint. That, and Flint’s letter, led me here. But he did not mention Thomas Hamilton.”

James squints thoughtfully. Thomas says, “I endeavored to leave him with the impression that I was allied with Spanish intelligence.” A knuckle raps against the table next to him. “At the prompting of Rebekah,” he adds quickly, “and with the assistance of Marielena, both of whom were invaluable. Likely, he did not divulge my presence because he suspected that John, in turn, might have allies among the Spanish.”

“And thus perhaps you as well,” John comments without lifting his head from his plate or glancing down the table. He’s barely spoken three words since they sat down.

Miss Scott considers this with a frown. “How did he come to find you?”

Marielena’s fork scrapes against her plate. John says nothing; so James answers in a low voice, “You remember Israel Hands.”

To Thomas’ surprise, Miss Scott smiles. “‘Lust, forgetful of future suffering, hurries us along the forbidden path.’”

“Oh, not this again,” John snaps. “Israel fucking Hands was not _in love with me_.”

“I did not say love,” Miss Scott counters, seemingly unruffled by John’s sharp tone. “I said lust, and he most certainly held you in that regard. And you speak of him in the past tense. Has he met his end?”

“Yes. I killed him. He’s buried underneath the walnut tree outside.”

Miss Scott lifts her eyebrows. “‘It is no policy to let thy lusts have arms, which are sure to rise and declare against thee when thine enemy comes.’ I will pay my respects. He saved my life, once.”

Impressively, James manages to keep his opinions on Mr. Hands to himself.

A frown grows on Miss Scott’s face. She stares at the wall over Thomas’ shoulder as she speaks. “If Julius believed me to be in alliance with Spanish intelligence, then he would likely have killed me outright. Bad enough that I harried the British in Jamaica; if I allied myself with the Spanish, the anger towards me would have become a torrent from London. A torrent that might have rained upon his own treaty.”

Leaning minutely forward, John catches James’ gaze. Their eyes are intent on one another. “Julius struck me as a supreme pragmatist,” James says without looking away. “I expect he did not wish to fully show his hand to anyone, even you.”

It is a diversion, and it does not work. The frown on Miss Scott’s face has deepened; her cutlery hang unused in her hands. She looks at Thomas. “If he had believed me to be in alliance with you, he would have killed me outright. But if I were not, and you had been Spanish intelligence, you would have put me in chains as surely as the British. Julius never trusted any Christian men and he did not know that Flint and I had opened correspondence of our own; he would not have expected Silver or Flint to intercede on my behalf. He sent me here to die, in chains or without.”

Silence falls over the table. James and Thomas exchange a swift glance. John’s eyes are fixed on his plate, his expression shuttered. Marielena looks alarmed again. Only Rebekah continues to drink her soup, seeming to ignore them all. (But of course, only seeming.)

It’s Erik who breaks the silence. “Well, none of us are Spanish intelligence, so far as I know. Unless Ms. Marielena has been hiding some truly extraordinary subterfuge.” He narrows his eyes at her suspiciously. “Is this very meal laced with poison?”

“ _Eres un chico tonto_ ,” Marielena scoffs, her alarm momentarily forgotten. “Here, pass me the empty potato bowl.”

“Why, so you can add more poison?”

She leans across John to rap Erik’s knuckles with a ladle. They squabble. As they do so, James leans closer to Miss Scott, who is also gazing down into her plate with a troubled expression. “Either he thought you likely to perish at our hands,” he murmurs, “or he thought you intended to remain here with John. Perhaps it better that he think you dead—alive, you are still a bargaining tool that he might yet use.”

Miss Scott nods, but still appears shaken. “I had not expected a Maroon man to think in such a way. But of course he would. We all have balanced the lives of few against the lives of many, and followed the logical path.”

“Oh well,” Thomas interjects, “not _all_ of us.”

When she sends him a quizzical gaze, he tips his head to the side. John flinches as they all three turn to regard him. Erik has risen from the table—ostensibly to observe Marielena in the kitchen and ascertain that she is not poisoning them all on behalf of Felipe V—and thus John is currently without a buffer between him and his wife.

“That is true,” Miss Scott says, studying her husband thoughtfully. “I recall that your chief complaint against our war was exactly that—the measuring of my life against those of many others. At the time I could not stand your way of thinking…but now I find myself wounded by the idea of Julius choosing to sacrifice me for the safety of those same lives. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Well,” John answers slowly. He turns his fork over and over in his hands before setting it down and wiping his hand on the tablecloth. His manners have always been atrocious, the worst of their household. At least Marielena isn’t currently present to howl at him for sullying her fine new tablecloths. “I would hazard to guess that you found the sacrifice more acceptable when it was your hand upon the scale…your choice to make that sacrifice.”

“And yet it was not my choice,” she counters. “It was yours. Woodes Rogers wanted the cache in exchange for my life, and with it an end to the conflict. I was in chains, and would have died thus if you had chosen differently.”

“Are you asking me to interpret your mind for you? If so, you will have to forgive me, I am several years out of practice.” And yet, after a pause, he says, “You didn’t marry Julius.”

Her eyebrows rise. “No, I did not. Do you suppose that our marriage made me less inclined to forgive your betrayal than his?”

“I don’t know. But…from what I know of you, you expect sincerity from your familiars. You were angry with me because I betrayed you in order to save your life, at the cost of your war and who knows how many others who then died in chains. Now you are angry with Julius because he betrayed you in order to protect the lives of others. Our end goals might have been opposite, but our methods were far too similar, and I expect that you find them equally objectionable.”

Picking up his fork again, he resumes eating. Miss Scott does not; she sits and gazes steadily at John.

“I didn’t marry Julius,” she says.

John scowls. “I know, I just said that.”

“I was not _familiar_ with Julius.”

“I know that,” John says, but there’s a slight lessening of tension around his eyes. He hadn’t known.

“ _Exitus acta probat,_ ” says Miss Scott and dear God in Heaven but Thomas cannot help interrupting.

“Do you speak Latin? Forgive me, that came out quite incredulous. It is only that I was given to understand you grew up on an island in the West Indes, and many of my classmates could not even manage French.”

She gives him a cool look. “Many of my people were your classmates’ tutors.”

“Ah. Of course. Forgive me. Do you agree with Ovid, then?”

“I believed that I did. But in this moment, I find myself a hypocrite. Julius might have shielded a hundred lives by sacrificing mine and I should find no fault in this—and yet in my heart I am wronged by him, for doing that which I condemned you for _not_ doing.” She fixes her steady, thoughtful gaze on John again. “That does not seem right. It seems that I must forgive one of you, or undo my entire way of thinking.”

John has left off eating entirely and stares into his cup, turning it about in his hands. “I will leave off pleading my case if only you promise not to absolve Julius of his.”

Miss Scott scoffs. “You may rest well. That is not likely.”

Having cast John into treacherous waters, Thomas fishes him out by turning to Erik, who is making his way back to the table with the replenished potato bowl. “Erik, would you care to recount your campaign against the wasps? When first we moved in,” Thomas adds to Miss Scott, “we had to evict the previous occupants, and Erik made it his business to do battle with the wasp nests. He named each colony after one of the more unbearable city officials. I only discovered this when he proudly announced to James one morning that he had finally killed Alderman Logan.”

James guffaws. Far too much of his sharp humor has rubbed off on Erik; they must have a care, for what is gauche for a white man to jest at would cause a moral outrage if heard from the mouth of a mulatto slave boy. Yet in their own home, at least, they may allow themselves the freedom. Indeed, they must.

Erik launches into a retelling of his crusade with great enthusiasm and more than a few embellishments, likely suited to impress Miss Scott. Thomas dearly hopes that the boy isn’t _too_ taken with her—that possibility seems rife with the potential for heartbreak and hurt feelings, in more ways than one.

They manage to finish the meal, an extraordinary feat in itself, and Rebekah disappears upstairs. Thomas convinces Marielena to let the dishes sit overnight so that she may join them in the front parlor rather than toiling away like a servant while they cavort. “Come, my dear, Brutus shall keep away the mice.”

“Who is Brutus?” Miss Scott asks.

“Brutus,” James says with feigned distaste, “is the replacement for Israel Hands. Though she be but a cat, yet her devotion and ferocity is no less.”

“Ah,” Miss Scott says, comprehending immediately. She looks across the parlor at John. “I do hope her lust is less. Will you summon your new bravo? I should like to meet her.”

John scowls. “Christ, I’d forgotten how unbearable the two of you become in close company.” But he goes to the back door of the house and makes soft noises between his lips for a few moments. Shortly thereafter, a large gray shadow appears at his foot and rubs against his peg leg before being hoisted onto John’s shoulder.

As John reenters the parlor, Miss Scott’s eyes widen. “Silver. That is not a cat.”

“No, it is not,” James agrees. “It is a demon that guards the gate of Hell. The Greeks had it wrong when they called Cerebrus a dog.”

“Hush,” John says. “She has delicate sensibilities. Don’t you, my dear?” The last is said in a singsong to Brutus.

The lady herself turns her head around technically further than a cat should. Thomas feels fairly certain that she is part owl. Her large yellow eyes land on Miss Scott and her yowl rends the air.

It takes some time for Miss Scott to overcome her initial apprehension; Thomas gathers that there were not many cats on the island where she grew up, and certainly none so…sizable. It does not help that Brutus clearly detects John’s apprehension, and remains close to his side. Miss Scott does not appear to begrudge her that decision.

By now it is quite late. Miss Scott looks to the windows, then to the clock. “I have never been so far north before,” she says. “The works of Pytheas and Caliph Al-Mamun are known to me, but I confess that the reality of their observations is…alarming. I find myself wanting to ask if your clock has broken.”

“It is not, I assure you,” James tells her. “At this latitude, the days will shorten to just over nine hours. I knew a man once who sailed with the Englishman, Hudson. He spoke of a land so far north that morning never came—just an endless twilight, in which green flames danced across the sky and provided the only source of illumination.”

“Green flame in the sky?” she asks with equal skepticism and awe.

“The Norsemen called it _norðrljós_. Others call it the Northern Lights. We do not often see it this far south, but should you stay the winter with us, I expect you shall see it at least once.”

A beat of silence follows this pronouncement. Thomas strives to keep his expression mild; he glances with utmost casualness towards John. Unfortunately, Brutus has stretched across John’s lap on her back and is lazily batting at a loose thread on his jacket cuff, a project with which John appears wholly preoccupied. He walks his fingers across the arm of his chair, smiling as Brutus stretches a little further in pursuit of her prey, yet does not deign to rise.

“I should very much like to see them,” Miss Scott replies.

She appears much heartened by her nap earlier, but could likely do with more rest; for his part, Thomas has been following the sun to bed earlier and earlier with absolutely no shame. Soon, he expects, he will feel the itch of idleness and fling himself into a new project now that their home is—mostly—livable and their finances secured. (Very secured. Bribes have been paid to the Delaware tribe in order to secure the safety of Erik’s settlement of freemen. For what remains, James built a new chest, which now resides in the cellar. He and Marielena have keys; James tried to give one to John and he rather fiercely refused.) Until such a time as he is pricked into action, Thomas feels more than happy to retire at an hour that would have made his younger self exclaim in horror at the wasted time.

No more talk is made of finding an inn on the town. Miss Scott thanks them gratefully for the lodging before she returns to the front bedroom that overlooks second street. Thomas imagines that it cannot escape her notice that John shares _their_ bedroom. He wonders, with a touch of his own apprehension, whether that will continue—but tonight, at least, John follows them into their quarters without hesitation.

Once the door is shut, he does immediately tell them both, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right,” Thomas replies. James seems wholly preoccupied with turning down their covers.

John remains by the door. “I just want to fucking sleep. Is that so much to ask? I’m sure that you are both brimming with the desire to dissect me but you’ll have to excuse my—”

“Silver,” James says as he shucks his trousers. “Shut the fuck up and get in bed.”

“Who do you think cursed more, Navy men or pirates?” Thomas asks as he hangs his waistcoat in the wardrobe.

“Both equally,” James answers, “for most pirates were Navy men first.”

John remains near the door for another minute, obviously wary of their intentions. Once he has stripped to his nightshirt, Thomas heaves a sigh and crosses to him, taking his hand. Both he and James have such rough hands, weathered by their rough lives.

“Come to bed, my dear,” he says. “There will be time for dissection in the morning, and your lovers are both old men who need their sleep.”

“Speak for yourself,” James growls as if he hasn’t taken to falling asleep in the downstairs parlor while seated upright, listening to Thomas read.

John still appears dubious but allows himself to be led to the bedside, where he disrobes readily enough.

His tension does not leave him, however, even as they lie curled together under the covers.

-o-

In the morning, James slips from their bed first, as is his custom. Thomas has japed that he still hears the ringing of a ship’s bell inside his mind, but the truth is likely not far off. Thomas himself has never roused enough in those early morning hours to check James’ internal clock against the time.

Footsteps come around to his side of the bed and Thomas rouses enough to tilt his chin up for a kiss. James’ rough hand passes over his face. “I shall be home for dinner,” James murmurs. “I am seeing Erik to the edge of town.”

Thomas peels his eyes open and frowns. He hadn’t known they intended to visit the free camp today. James strokes his face again. “Erik wants to bring Miss Scott to the encampment, but he felt a certain amount of heraldry is warranted.”

“Ah. Well, she is a princess.”

That earns him a smile and another kiss.

Once James has departed for the day, Thomas drifts a while longer before rising to dress. He means to get a note to Mr. Sauer during his morning constitutional, in hopes of renewing their alliance—a bit of his own heraldry, he supposes.

As he pulls on his overcoat, he glances towards the bed. A pair of eyes peer out at him from the tangle of blankets and curly black hair. It is not uncommon for John to rise last, especially after such a restless night of sleep, and so Thomas treats it as such: he approaches with a soft smile in exchange for a kiss. John actually rises up onto one elbow and catches Thomas by the back of the neck, deepening the embrace further than Thomas had expected for this time of day—normally John will lie abed long after the rest of the household, especially since his illness. Thomas dearly hopes that he is not hiding some lingering effects of his malady from them.

John’s tongue moves against his. Thomas hums in approval before withdrawing to press a chaste kiss against his lips.

“I love you,” John says.

Thomas blinks. In his instant of frozen bewilderment, John flops back down on the bed and disappears underneath the pillows.

Well. All right. Thus far, James has guided them through the straits of feigned normalcy and Thomas is not inclined to alter their course when he is still so unsure what reefs lurk in the water around them. So he simply rests a hand on what he thinks is John’s blanket-covered hip (but might be his shoulder). “I love you too, my dear.”

The lump on the bed makes no reply, so Thomas puts on his shoes and goes out for a walk and to post his note to Mr. Sauer. It’s a rather involved process: some years ago, a well-to-do Englishman by the name of Neale had been commissioned by the crown to set up a postal service in the colonies, a task at which he rather brutally failed. Thomas is given to understand that Massachusetts possesses a functional mail post within the colony, and Virginia was reasonably reliable while they lived there; everywhere else, however, must rely on the use of slaves or indentured servants to deliver their letters.

Sometimes Thomas wonders if Neale’s efforts were deliberately hampered in order to boost the necessity of slave trade within the colonies. Certainly he knew enough unscrupulous politicians in the pockets of wealthy slavers to make the possibility a very real probability.

Given the nature of his note—he did not mention Madi by name, of course, or anything to do with the free encampment—Thomas feels inclined to deliver the note to Mr. Sauer’s home personally, but that entails a journey to Ephrata, some fifty miles to the interior of the colony, quite a bit beyond the length of his morning constitutional. Mr. Sauer comes regularly to Philadelphia for business but Thomas isn’t sure when next to expect him. So he catches Amos Inglewood on his way out of town and presses a coin into his reluctant hand. Amos is a plainspoken fellow entirely uninterested in letters, learning to read, or speaking more than ten words at a time on any subject that isn’t the collection and sale of firewood; still, he’s as reliable as a sundial. He promises to deliver the note, and that’s enough for Thomas.

On his journey back to the house, Thomas turns the corner of Market Street and finds Miss Scott standing on the corner. Across the muddy terrain of the street is a construction site, from which erupts a spire of scaffolding, the skeletal hand of a future church grasping at the heavens. Miss Scott gazes up at it with an opaque expression.

Thomas approaches. They gesticulate their greetings before Thomas says, “I’m given to understand this is the site of Christ Church, of the Anglican faith. The spire is a subject of some commentary—once the renovations are finished, it will be almost two hundred feet high, the tallest building yet built in the colonies.”

“I saw such buildings in Bristol, and Southhampton,” Miss Scott comments as her eyes follow the movements of a worker—likely an indentured servant, judging from his appearance—hoisting a beam of wood higher on the scaffolding. “But though I lived in England for almost two years, I never traveled to London. Silver assured me that it was a place of mud and starving people, of cut-throats and squalor that would rival the most depraved pirate ship. Is this true?”

Thomas chuckles, joining his hands together behind his back. “In this, my lady, I can assure you: he did not lie.”

“And yet the riches of so many countries, the labor of so many peoples, both willing and unwilling, have gone to that city. How can this be?”

“It does not stay there. Wealth of unimaginable levels does pour through London, but the lords and ladies all have their country estates, from which they orchestrate their investments or hire men to oversee their money for them. They rarely journey to Londontown itself, and when they find it necessary, they bar the doors of their grand town homes so as not to glance upon the abject poverty that surrounds them.”

The memory of his father’s home rises around Thomas momentarily. God, what opulence they had enjoyed. Miranda’s sumptuous gowns, the delicate ivory pieces of Thomas’ chessboard—hell, even one of his wigs would have cost more than James’ yearly salary as a Navy lieutenant. Meanwhile, women and children starved in the street right outside. How barbaric they all were.

“It occurs to me to ask,” Miss Scott says, breaking into his thoughts, “that if a war could be waged against England, against any of these great and terrible nations, the people fighting it would most certainly _not_ be the lords and ladies?”

“No, it would not. Unless a second son fell particularly out of favor, or a third felt a calling for the military life. And even then, they’d be officers.” Thomas gestures down the street and Miss Scott obligingly falls in at his side.

“Was our friend a lord’s son?” she asks. “Before he became…a captain.”

“Ah. No. James was an exception. A carpenter’s son who nonetheless rose through the ranks. The low condition of his birth drew considerable scorn from his fellow officers, who believed the superiority of their father’s name compensated for the inferiority of their intellect, skill, and manner.”

Miss Scott is quiet for long enough that Thomas glances over. She regards him with a faint smirk. “You have spoken many times in his defense, haven’t you.”

“Ah…more often, he came to mine, and that of…my wife. Our life in London was unconventional and drew many remarks. I’m given to understand that James reacted to such comments with—”

She interrupts, “I can imagine _exactly_ how he would have reacted.”

“To return to your previous question, in those great and terrible nations the foot soldiers of war generally come from the ranks of those who benefit the least from its outcome, and make the fewest decisions about its execution.”

“Why, then, do they fight?”

“Any number of reasons.” They turn the street towards their front door and Thomas steps forward to open it for her. “Most of which have been honed and crafted by the lords and ladies. Patriotism, hatred of the other, some may spring to violence from a source of their own dark wellspring, but far more than any of these is the promise of a steady wage and a pension should they survive combat. In other words, a way to escape poverty.”

Miss Scott, in the process of removing her coat, makes an appalled expression. “A condition placed upon them by the lords and ladies, who then enjoy the spoils of war.”

“Indeed. And so the cycle continues. Once, I had hoped that in the New World we might escape the sins of the old, but. You have seen how that went.”

She smiles and they hang their coats on the hooks by the door. Noise draws them into the front parlor: James has brought a small reading desk from the library and is in the process of setting it up near the window; he stands, smiling proudly as he dusts off his hands. In contrast, John stands nearby, holding a stack of fine new paper with the air of a criminal caught in the act.

“We imagined you might appreciate your own desk, mum,” James tells Miss Scott. Oh, this is absolutely delightful; he _likes_ her. So few people ever rouse James to the desire of their companionship. “Erik mentioned that you had several letters that you wished to compose on his behalf.”

Miss Scott looks taken aback, but well-pleased. “I do. Thank you, Captain…Captain _s_ ,” she amends.

“Yes, well.” John tosses the paper stack onto the desk. He’s left off the false leg today; of late he’s taken to wearing an actual boot tucked over his metal appendage, secured to the end of his pants with pins. To the unknowing eye, Thomas imagines that it gives the appearance of a full—if deformed—left leg. _He fears recognition_ , James had told Thomas when he commented on the matter. “I warned him that, given the prodigious nature of your letter-writing, you might start ripping up the floorboards on which to write your missives.”

“I only did that once,” she replied as she removed her shawl and moved to sit in the chair that James offered her. “And it was in the most dire of circumstances.”

Unfortunately John does not continue their charming repartee, but occupies himself by fetching firewood. Miss Scott turns to James. “Is Erik still at the encampment?”

“He is, mum. His mother thought it best to advise the Delaware of your arrival, so he has remained overnight in talks. I returned so as not to arouse suspicion in the town.”

Pulling two of their parlor chairs closer to Miss Scott’s desk, Thomas claims one for himself. There proceeds a lengthy discussion, during which it is decided that Miss Scott shall write a letter of introduction to be presented to the Delaware leaders. That necessitates finding an extremely discreet translator; Thomas mentions that Mr. Sauer as a possibility, given that he is currently translating the Bible into multiple native tongues, which in turn leads to James and Thomas explaining the whole of their acquaintanceship with Mr. Sauer to Miss Scott.

She is, understandably, skeptical about trusting an unknown white man with such a dangerous matter. “Does Erik not speak their language?” she asks.

“Speaks Dutch, English, and is learning Delware, but does not read English well. I’m given to understand that the Delaware of this area do not have a written language, so he would be translating it on the spot.”

Miss Scott considers that with a frown. “In the encampment my father built, the refugees of many tribes were welcomed, some of which had never seen members of a different tribe, let alone spoken each other’s languages. He found ways to communicate with them. They trusted him. I think that if Erik is to act in the role my father played, he must be the one speaking. I will keep the letter short and simple. What do you imagine the reaction will be?”

“It’s difficult to say. I imagine some will require reassurance, which your presence will surely bring. Some may desire to leave this place for the Indes. Is that a possibility?”

Miss Scott worries at her lower lip. “I…do not know the state of the treaty being formed on Jamaica. It is possible that they have signed a similar agreement to the one made with my mother’s people, in which case any new freedmen I send to them might be turned away or turned over to the British.”

Thomas blanches. “Surely they would not.”

“If it is a choice between the safety of an entire settlement known to them, or a few strangers from the North, how do you think they will answer?”

“I see.” It still seems dreadful, but Thomas is not about to pass judgement on those who have escaped their chains and likely will do anything to avoid a return to that state.

James has taken to pacing a path in front of Miss Scott’s desk with his hands gathered behind his back. Oh, Thomas dearly wishes he could have contrived to take a journey on a ship with the young Lieutenant McGraw—but that is a thought entirely inappropriate to their current discussion. James says, “Several of the freedmen have spoken to Erik about passage to Florida, but I believe them the minority. Some still have family in town, enslaved in homes or working for merchants, whom they desire to free. Persuading them to leave would mean asking them to abandon their hopes for reunion—no easy task.”

“Yet one that we must undertake, should it prove in their best interests,” Miss Scott replies. “Slave owners recognize these sorts of attachments, and frequently make use of them as a chain more terrible than iron manacles. I wonder, though, if passage to Florida or the West Indes is the safest path to take, should flight prove a necessary evil. You say there are many children in this settlement—to ask a child to travel across nearly the entire length of the colonies, through Virginia and the Carolinas and Georgia, at the speed necessary to evade recapture…”

“We would lose too many,” Thomas says, his belly tight. “Yet I wonder—I imagine that many parents would take that risk, preferring the risks of travel to the certainty of a life in chains.”

“I agree, Mr. Hamilton.”

“Thomas. If you please.”

She inclines her head. “It must be considered as a measure of last resort. But what of the French territory to the north, or moving them further inland? I confess to know little of the political situation among northern colonies.”

Briefly, James describes the Drummond campaign and the sentiment towards African slaves amongst the native tribes. Thomas sips his tea; he is trying not to think about iron manacles on his wrists and ankles, the cold of cell bars. Obviously, the situations are vastly different, but his mind will not accept reason and instead seeks to tangle them together. He takes another sip of tea and looks around the room. He is not in Bedlam. He is in their front parlor. Rebekah has joined them, though she appears entirely preoccupied with John: the two of them are engaged in a heated yet whispered discussion near the fireplace. Whatever topic so engages them, Thomas suspects it is the same reason that Marielena has been in a dark mood all morning, stomping about and insisting that she simply must go into town today and John must be the one to accompany her. If Thomas didn’t know any better, he would say that Marielena is doing her best to rescue John from something.

“Thomas?”

He jumps. James is watching him with concern dusted over his features. “Forgive me, I wandered a bit,” Thomas says. “My apologies, Miss Scott—”

“Madi,” she corrects then smiles wryly at him. “If I am to be familiar with you, then let us be equals in that, as all other things.” By God, he likes her. Thomas smiles, set aright on his feet again. “I had asked after your acquaintance, Mr. Sauer. While I think my letter of introduction would be better received from Erik than a white man, I should like to meet with Mr. Sauer to discuss other subjects. If he was willing to forge a writ of sale for Erik, perhaps he may be willing to do so again. Could you arrange an introduction…?”

“Yes, yes of course. I already posted a note to his office, on my morning walk. We have…hesitated to bring him fully into our confidence, out of respect to Erik’s caution, but I defer to your judgment of his character. I think you will find him a most vociferous ally.”

“Let us hope so. It is possible that we may have to explore all avenues that we have voiced here today, which, while more difficult to organize, may provide the most safety to the most people. To move an entire encampment like this would draw far too much attention, no matter whether the path we choose is to the West Indes, or north, or deeper into the continent, but should the encampment fragment…”

She trails off as the argument unfolding near the fireplace reaches new levels of ferocity and volume. John and Rebekah have switched entirely to Ladino; John waves the fire poker about and Rebekah is practically spitting her words.

“I beg your pardon,” Thomas snaps, “but have you two forgotten how to have a conversation without _bellowing_ at one another?”

They cut off, heaving and glaring; then John flings his arms outward, nearly losing his crutch in the process and splattering ash in an arc. “Fine! Fine, ask her! Go on! I’m not going to, fuck you.”

He spins away, hobbling closer to the fire and jabbing at it with enough force to cast a few sparks on the hearth. Rebekah hesitates for a bare moment then marches over to Madi’s small desk. She sits down in the chair meant for James and fixes Madi with the gaze of a commissioner making her interview.

“What is your opinion on gods?” she asks.

They all blink, except for John who is still furiously stirring at the fireplace. He’ll set his beard on fire before long.

“I…have none?” Madi answers. “I do believe that the…spirits of my family and my people who have passed into death do not fade, but walk with me still. I believe that they watch over me and guide my steps, guard me from harm, and are owed respect due to their gifts to me, of life and liberty, and home. I do not believe in your Christian god, if that is what you mean.”

“Not Christian,” Rebakah corrects. “Jewish.”

Thomas glances sideways, curious. With the bearing of a princess, it is difficult to follow the sequence of thoughts on Madi’s face; but she does look at John quickly, then at the rest of them. So she knew, and John communicated his wariness of others knowing his secret. Thomas does his best to project a reassuring air while also pretending not to have much interest in the conversation.

“I know some about your Jewish god and the stories of your people,” Madi says eventually, though her eyes linger on John’s back.

“Would you be willing to teach these lessons to your children?”

“I—forgive me, but I have no children, and even if I wished to have them, why would I teach them about a god in which I do not believe?”

“Because that, my dear, is the right and proper way to be a Jew,” John says. Then: “She wants to know if you’ll convert and have children with me. That’s what all this is about, because _this one_ ,” he points the fire poker at Rebekah, “wants _Jewish babies_. And apparently, she is mortally opposed to carrying them herself, and so she is farming me out like a stallion. I _told you_ ,” he adds to Rebekah, before switching to Ladino for a few sentences.

“She doesn’t _have_ to like you,” Rebekah snaps in English. “She’s your wife. And she cannot convert—not officially,” she adds to Madi. “The _kal_ will not accept converts, nor likely recognize your children. But I would. There are others, too, who would consider you a Jew if you took that path. And even if they did not call you such, they might accept your children. I would.”

Few things can describe Madi’s expression in that moment. She looks at John then at Rebekah. “I,” she says, “I have not considered. Children. That is to say, for years my life has been incompatible with the rearing of children. I have lived in constant danger, under threat of—”

Rebekah is shaking her head. “No, that is _when_ you should have children. So that even if you die, they will live.”

Madi sits back in her chair. “I do not consider that a worthy legacy. To leave a child motherless, alone, uncared-for.”

“Not. Uncared-for.” Rebekah hits the desk twice then her own chest as her frustration spills over into the physical.

Leaning forward, Thomas flicks his fingers and asks if she needs help. She jerks her head hard to one side, wringing her hands and struggling with herself.

When she speaks again it is with the effort of dragging each word out from underneath a boulder. “There is nothing, nothing that means more than life. Living. Children. Survival.” She strikes her knee to punctuate these three. “The purpose of life is to live, and to give life to others. What else? Nothing. Nothing.

“You live in danger. I live in danger. He lives in danger. It will not stop. Will you wait forever to be safe? I understand why you are angry with him. But I also understand why he did it. We have lived in chains, too…we have been taken from our homes and made to bend under the whip, except we have been surviving that for _four thousand years_. For us, survival is its own war, and as long as there one Jew left in the entire world, _then we’ve won_.”

Having spoken thus, she makes a few high, thin noises and stares at the floor, rocking in place. Thomas glances over at John in time to catch him gazing at her with a strange, wild look of hatred. No, not hatred…fear. He notes Thomas’ attention far too soon and jerks away to the fire again. James, meanwhile, seems rooted to the spot, his eyes darting between Madi and Rebekah. So transfixed is he that Thomas finds himself combing his memory for every time that James has ever spoken on the subject of children. When he spoke of his time with Miranda in Nassau, he had said they could not bear to bring children into a life so filled with grief…but here, now, James looks very much like a man who has discovered that he wants something terribly, and is afraid to admit it even to himself.

From behind the desk, Madi spends several long moments studying Rebekah. Her expression is once again difficult to interpret, though Thomas would guess that it is less by design and more because the roil of thoughts and emotions in her response prevents any one from rising to the surface.

Finally, she says, “I will think on that.”

Rebekah’s hands are in fists, her eyes screwed shut. After a moment she rises sharply from her chair and leaves the room.

In her absence, silence swells like a mushroom, threatening to burst with unknown consequences. Thomas fixes his eyes on James and says, “Anyway. Yes. I can certainly contact Mr. Sauer and inquire as to any resources he might possess or know of—I expect he could provide intelligence as to the native populations of the interior and what help or hindrance we might expect to find there.”

James still looks dazed by realization, but rallies himself enough to reply, “Moving them by ship from the harbor will mean smuggling them into town. I could bring a few at a time in my cart, if we could find a safe place to hide them. I would suggest this house, were it not for its visibility. Somewhere, perhaps, closer to the docks…”

Madi is watching John. Whatever she fears, it is not the unseen consequences left behind by Rebekah.

She asks, “What is your name?”

The question is not surprising, yet somehow it takes them all by surprise. Thomas looks at James, whose eyes dart between them swift as a trapped sparrow. Only Madi is steady, watching John’s back.

She says, “John is the name of a Christian apostle, not of a Jew.”

“No, it isn’t,” John answers. He keeps his back to her.

“So what is your true name?” she asks, for she appears to be without mercy where mercy would be a lie.

For a long moment John says nothing; and then he begins to laugh. It is a strangled sound. He strikes at the fire a few times. Sparks fly in haphazard directions.

“What a contradictory _bitch_ of a life,” John says. “All the moral philosophers in the world could not explain it. Every good thing that’s ever happened to me has been the product of lies, murder, and betrayal on my part, while all of the agonies resulted from the few, the _precious fucking few_ moments when I acted against my own nature and attempted…loyalty? Kindness? Self-sacrifice? All of the fine noble traits that I am promised will buy me the favor of God and society have at various times instead taken from me my dignity, my leg, my sanity, my health, my friends, my wife, and—and my husband.”

His eyes dart over to James; before that one can speak, however, John continues, his manner turning more and more theatrical. He gestures with the poker, he speaks to the ceiling as if to an invisible, celestial audience rather than the human one that exists around the room. “So you must understand why I hesitate to be honest with you, my dear, or with anyone, given how I have suffered under Aesop’s thumb. Where the guiding principle of the fucking universe rewards the nobility of others, in me, oh no—it _abhors_ my honesty, my decency, and rewards even my foulest of deeds. I fear that if I am honest with you in this moment, I will shortly be dragged from this house by the governor’s men, or struck down by lightning from Heaven itself.

“However!” He smiles brightly and points the poker up like a raised finger. “I take comfort in one thing: I am almost certain that none of you are going to believe me when I say that my name is Shlomo, or what you Christians would call _Solomon_. I don’t recall my family’s name, but at the orphanage they called me Little—therefore, Solomon Little.”

He finally looks at them each, one after the other. Whatever is on their faces, it makes his grin widen. “There, you see?” he says, and turns back to the fireplace.

It is rather anticlimactic; James has already shared the name with Thomas and Madi looks similarly unsurprised. Her gaze remains trained on her husband. “Why did you never—?”

“ _What does it fucking matter?_ ” John shouts and they all jump at the suddenness of the noise. He doesn’t turn from the fireplace to face them; he stands with his shoulders hunched and his head down. “Why do you fucking—you all want to _pluck_ at me until I sing a tune but there’s no music there. Why can’t you fucking _let it be_ —”

“John,” Thomas says.

“—why—why not _drag out Solomon’s little corpse_ and see where—it’s _over_ , I _lived_ , why won’t you just fucking let me _live_ —?”

As he speaks and they flounder in the force of his voice, Marielena abruptly enters the dining room, fully dressed for the town, and practically tosses her sewing kit at James, who had been moving towards John. He barely manages to catch it, stopped in his tracks. 

Marielena doesn’t even spare a glance towards John or Thomas. Instead she marches around the table and gestures sharply at Madi. “Stand up.”

Madi, clearly unaccustomed to being ordered about, stands. Marielena steps closer and briskly uses her hands to measure the circumference of Madi’s waist, the distance from her shoulders to her inseam, the length of her arm.

“You will need clothes,” Marielena says as she does so, “for I have looked at your pack and you have brought nothing but books with you. If someone sees you in these clothes then they will notice you.”

“I—you do not need to—I do not have the money for—”

“Nevermind that,” Marielena says. “John, fetch your shoe, I’m ready to go. You English will stay in bed and talk all day, but life turns on. The sun rises and someone has to fetch supper before nightfall or you all will starve and then where will you be, hm? _Todo tiene solución, menos la muerte_ , so why waste the day arguing over the night that came before. John, _vamonos_.”

For a moment Thomas fears that John will not take the extended offer of escape, but then he secures the poker with the careful movements of a man who would rather fling the implement and leaves the room without meeting anyone’s eyes. The door opens and shuts behind them with a heavy thud.

When it is just the three of them, Madi puts both hands on the desk, as if bracing herself, and says, “I am sorry. I did not wish to…upset the peace you have built here.”

“My dear lady,” Thomas says. “What peace we have built in this place is newer than a spring lamb. If you had come but six months earlier, you would have found us scattered and sickly, living in poverty and at each other’s throats half the time. It isn’t our household if someone isn’t in overly-dramatic distress about something.”

That appears to mollify her, though she still frowns as she drinks her tea. There is a moment of silence until James asks, “Did Marielena say that you’ve brought books?”

“Oh. Yes. They are for you.”

It breaks Thomas’ heart to see how quickly James perks up. All those years of blood and darkness and rage, and all he ever truly wants to do is _read_. “Truly?”

Despite their assertions that it can wait until after they conclude their business, she moves at once to retrieve her gifts and produces several thick tomes that James eagerly takes from her hands. When he looks at the spines, he goes very still. “Oh,” he breathes, as if the air has been stolen from him.

“Silver said that it was a favorite of yours.”

“Did he? Well. Yes.” James looks at Thomas, and Thomas _knows_ before James hands over one of the books. _Meditations_ , by Marcus Aurelius.

When he can speak again, Thomas smiles and says, “Would you like to see our library?”

-o-

Marielena is angry. Anger is a sin, of course, one of the worst, but by God she is angry.

Always, she has thought James and Thomas to be clever men, but not very intelligent. Men who speak better than they think. She had not expected Rebekah to be the same. Passionate, yes, but reasonable.

And yet today, she wants to beat all three of them in the head.

Beside her, John says nothing as they walk to the high market. _He_ has always been more clever than intelligent, but at least he knows that. Marielena has watched him all morning as he listened to stories about babies dying in the wilderness or in slavery. And then Rebekah…

She does not understand how the others can be so stupid.

Under the awning of the high market, John talks again. The voices are not John. He flirts with _la ropera_ then scowls at the butcher. He tells Alfonso the baker a story about Marielena killing a racoon with a broom, and it is so funny that Alfonso gives them tarts for free.

Marielena has seen him do this before, when that terrible pirate with the scarred face came to their home. When he had stood in their doorway, Marielena would have sworn that John’s very eyes had changed colors.

She thinks that all of them—Thomas, James, Rebekah, John’s wife, _la ropera_ , the butcher, Alfonso, the scarred pirate—have seen John become something else. She thinks that all of them believe _they_ are the one who have seen his true self.

She does not think she has. She does not think John has a true self.

Once Marielena’s basket is full of food, they go down to the front street near the docks. It is not too busy to sit and look at the water; sometimes, ships come in two, three at a time and the streets crowd with carts and people, but right now there is no one. They sit and eat their tarts. Marielena tries to think of something else to do in town. She does not think she should take John back to the house yet.

John finishes eating first—always he wolfs his food—and sits staring out at the water while Marielena takes her time, enjoying the tart. Once she is finished, only then does he look at her with bright, feverish eyes. “Is this when _you_ ask me?” he says in Spanish.

It takes her a moment to understand, and then she blurts, “ _No_ ,” with enough horror that he startles. She shakes her head. “No, I do not want to know. Do not tell me, it is bad enough that you have to live it.”

He does not trust this. She can see that in his face. She sighs and says, “I told you that my father’s tribe died of the pox, and that I was taken in by Jesuit nuns. That was not…well, I did not _lie_ , but the truth is complicated. The nuns took me not from the remains of my father’s tribe, but from French trappers. I remember my father, and then I remember being at the nunnery, and older than I was before. I do not remember the trappers at all. I must have been with them for two years, but that time is gone from me, and I do not want it back. If someone tried to tell me what happened during that time, I think I would run from them.

“No, if I thought that it would make you happy, I would give you all the coin in my pocket and tell you to get on a ship in the harbor. I would tell you to change your name, cut your hair, and sail until no one knows the name John Silver, until you are so far away that no one you have ever known would ever know anyone else who sailed that far. But I think you have tried that already, and wherever you go, _you_ are still with you.”

“And so is it,” John finishes. His eyes, still on the harbor, do not see any ships. “God. God. I can’t get away. Even when I have nothing else, it’s still there.”

Reaching out, Marielena takes his chin in hand and turns his head towards her. “Everything has a solution, except for death. We are going to find a way, here, now. You and I.”

“ _How?_ ” He’s nearly weeping. The illness broke something in him and now he is always so close. “I can’t—the words won’t come, Maria, and even if they did, it would kill me. I would end.”

“Do not try,” she says, taking his hand. “But there must be some way for you to live with it, and not spend your life running.”

John scoffs but grips her hand tight. They sit together under the warm sun. Far out in the bay, ships move in and out.

Marielena frowns. “Wait. Your name is Solomon Little? You tell stories about him all the time.”

John wipes his face. “They’re all lies.”

“Not all of them. You told Alfonso about the raccoon. It did not happen that way, but it did happen.” There are moments in Marielena’s life when her legs run with chills and her head ring like a bell; she grips John’s hand in hers. She feels God in this moment and knows that she is right. “Tell me a story about Solomon Little.”

A touch of the same feeling must reach John; yet his mouth only opens and closes. “I can’t…what about?”

“Anything.” When he still falters, she shifts to face him more fully and says, “I knew a boy named Solomon Little. He was—his family lived in…a land that was ruled by evil people. An evil king. The king—I am not good at this. The king feared that a child would one day hurt him and so he ordered all the children killed, so Solomon Little’s family had to flee, so they would not die with the others, why are you laughing? Do not laugh at me, I am trying to help!”

“I’m not laughing,” John says, laughing. “But oh, my darling, I do not know the Christian Bible well enough to be sure—did you just make me _Jesus_ in this story?”

“No,” Marielena snaps, though her fingers itch with the need to cross herself. “Those are the only stories I know!”

He laughs at her, but then he wipes his wet eyes and says, “Solomon Little’s family found passage on a ship. It was called the Marie Alleyne.”

-o-

Madi’s delight at their book collection is a frayed thing. “It is beautiful,” she says as her hands twist together.

James leans against the wall by the window seat and watches her, his cheek ticcing occasionally. Thomas occupies himself with finding a place for their newest acquisitions; _Meditations_ , he thinks, deserves a place of honor directly behind the large reading table in the center of the room. He says, “I do not suppose you speak Arabic, Miss Scott? Pardon me—Madi.”

“I do not.”

“No matter. There’s only two books just here that are written entirely in Arabic. Neither myself nor James have that tongue, and so they’ve been a source of some mystery and curiosity to us.”

Madi makes no reply. When Thomas glances over his shoulder, she stands framed by one of the large windows, gazing outward with her back to him. James meets his eye briefly but otherwise keeps his attention on her, clearly waiting for something, so Thomas allows the silence to swirl around them, an open space to be filled by words.

It takes several moments but eventually, the words come.

“I had thought,” Madi says softly to the window, “that we would be different. That the cruelties, the injustices, the depravities which belonged to those men who called themselves our natural betters would not be present among my people when we took up arms. And then, when they were, I told myself that these things had been learned, from the English and the Spanish. The pirates. That we…could not be blamed for the unnecessary bloodshed, when for so long it had been inflicted on us.

“But as time went on and the fighting grew bloodier, the words I whispered to myself at night wore thin. In Moore Town I saw one of my men cut down a Christian boy of seven years old; when I sought to discipline the man responsible, he claimed the boy had been holding a knife. There were still others, men who went beyond anger…men who enjoyed the killing. I did not think to find them among those who I called friends, but I did, and what was worse: I did not stop them. I needed them, and so I turned a blind eye to their savagery.”

“You’ve been to war,” James says. When she nods, he takes a kerchief from his pocket and offers it to her. “War is always thus, no matter who is fighting.”

The words do not seem to absolve that which torments her. “They asked me to go away. The Windward Maroons wish to make terms with the British, but they could not do so without promising to surrender me to them, and so they asked me to disappear. And I realized that is what you meant to do if we had succeeded in our war. If you had lived, I knew you meant to leave. And I was afraid…I knew from the beginning that you loved him, before you even told me.”

Now James is the one who looks away. Madi crosses to him and grips his hands, not letting him escape. “I could not leave my people behind, and I knew he loved you, better than he did. I feared not only that you might ask him to go with you, but that you would _not_ , out of kindness to me, and that he would grow to resent this gift.”

James scoffs. “I think you think me far kinder than I am, mum. If _I_ had known my feelings were returned, I likely would have thrown a bag over both your heads and got us all on the first ship to Tortuga.” Her face shifts and he tilts his head, smiling gently. “Yes, _both_. Whatever has grown between he and I, do not think for a moment he has forgotten your absence. I could not have stolen him from you and expected to keep his affections.”

“He—” A flush creeps up her neck. “Forgive me, but he seemed happy enough in the orchard.”

James blushes, too. Thomas wants to coo and hug them both; he restrains himself and crosses the room to stand at their sides. “Again, my dear, we are only a few months removed from utter disaster. Has James told you yet that when John learned he had smallpox, he tried to take his own life with laudanum?”

“ _Thomas_ ,” James exclaims, his flush turning to pallor, though it’s not clear whether he wants to protect Madi from knowledge of that event or just hates to have it spoken aloud. Perhaps both.

Madi stiffens. “No, he has not.”

“You should ask John about it. And then perhaps slap him a few times, it will be better received from you than one of us.”

“I think Marielena already did that,” James mutters.

“Truly? Ah well, I’m sorry I missed it. And even I know how badly John has missed you. Whatever…darkness lies behind you, please do not think to keep it from our door by removing yourself, as well. Rivers of darkness follow in all of our footsteps and yet in this place, here, may we find some scraps of happiness together, happiness that I pray you will share with us.”

Madi looks to James, who turns her hands over in his and presses them together. “This house is yours, mum, for however long you would have it be so.”

By the time they emerge from the library it is grown quite late in the afternoon, and they set about using the last of the day’s light to finish drawing up their plans. Madi writes her letter of introduction, and when Erik returns home she reads it to him.

The boy seems rather taken aback by their efforts on his behalf. “Thank you, sirs. Mum. I’m…thank you. But… _I’m_ to read the letter?”

Madi places a comforting hand over his. Whatever uncertainty she possessed mere hours ago, it is most assuredly set aside for now. “We shall practice. Fear not. Captain…James. Were we to move some of the encampment into the city, you suggested finding a house closer to the bay. Did you have a house in mind?”

James is just drawing breath to answer when the front door of the house abruptly slams open.

It’s John and Marielena. They enter on a whirlwind of words: John speaks with a pronounced accent of some kind that Thomas has never heard before. He appears fully ignorant to the presence of anyone but Marielena. His whole being is alight.

“—and little Solomon was _sacrificed_ by the band of thieves to their god. They strung him up by his left leg on a cross.”

Marielena appears to be unwillingly enraptured by the story. It is exactly the expression that Thomas has imagined whenever James described the effect that John had on their crew—an unsettling experience, perhaps, to see firsthand.

Not that Thomas has never seen it before. Oh, he has, many times, on the face of people far more powerful than little Marielena. Thomas has put it there.

John continues. “They left him on the cross overnight, until he remembered the knife hidden in his belt. Pulling it free, he tried to cut at the ropes around his ankle but couldn’t reach them. All this while a great storm roiled the horizon, drawing ever nearer, and Solomon’s skin crackled with the gather of lightning! The god of thieves came to devour him. So he steeled his nerves and began cutting the flesh of his own leg.”

Marielena notices their audience first and puts a hand on John’s arm. He blinks, jarred out of his near-feverish excitement in the face of their observation. “John,” she says, “go…go to the kitchen nook, I’ll want tea. Thomas,” she says, stepping past John. When Marielena pushes him, he drifts towards the kitchen. Marielena fixes her gaze on Thomas. “May I have some of your, the papers you do not use for letters?”

“Of course,” Thomas says slowly. James and Madi both look after John but do not pursue him. Erik mostly appears thoroughly confused as to the sudden tension. Thomas moves up the stairs and Marielena follows. He collects paper leftover from Mr. Denham’s printing press; they are all marked on one side with erroneous pages from where the apprentices mistook a typeset or the spelling became too atrocious to overlook. He and Marielena have been using it to practice her letters.

He digs out a stack and hands it to her. “My dear—”

“No,” says Marielena.

Thomas looks at her. There is a fierceness in her gaze that he has never seen before. She is so dearly plain, with her long face and crooked little moustache; but in this moment she burns with something that goes beyond beauty.

“No,” she repeats. “You are not going to make sense of this. To make sense of it would be to kill him. You are going to give us paper and pens and then you are going to _leave. It. Alone_.”

-The bible verse that Thomas quotes is Genesis 18:12.

-Thomas’ comparison of Silver’s body to a weary Hercules is a reference to the statue of the same name by Lysippos, an ancient Greek sculptor whose work became very popular in Europe during the 17th century.

-Aaand the poem is “A Sigh Sent to his Absent Love,” by William Cartwright (1611–1643). Thomas has no chill.

-No one actually knows what happened to Anne Bonny. She was in prison, sentenced to be hanged, and pled her belly (delayed execution because of pregnancy). Then she just sort of…disappeared. 😊 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bonny>

-It’s a little early for Madi to have been fighting in the Maroon Wars, but the history of that conflict was too fascinating not to bring into the story. Queen Nanny and Cudjoe were real people. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Maroons#Establishment_of_the_Leeward_and_Windward_Maroons>

-I wanna note that while Thomas has gotten more enlightened on certain subjects, a lot of his thinking is still _vastly_ colonialist. This is deliberate and I do not share these views.

-At dinner, Madi quotes the philosophers Claudian and William Gurnell, and the _exitus acta probat_ quote—“the ends justify the means”—is from Ovid.

-Brutus the cat is a Maine coon. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9gws6UGyNDk/maxresdefault.jpg

-I realize that Jewish attitudes towards conversion vary greatly. I consulted with a Sephardic sensitivity reader and looked at historical sources, and did my best to represent the most probable viewpoints of the time period; all that being said, I am a white, gentile Christian woman. If you feel like I fucked up, please do let me know.


End file.
